Photography Takes Over New York Galleries

This piece originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Photographs are made with light, but also with darkness. An extraordinary array of shows in New York mark the medium’s return to focus on the gallery scene after years dominated by figurative painting. In lieu of representation, they offer scenes of the unseen.

Marian Goodman presents Boris Mikhailov’s a largely archival show, “Refracted Times,” showing the undersides of his native Ukraine, alongside new work by An-My Lê. In “Dark Star,” Lê presents large-format views of the night sky over Mesa Verde, New Mexico. Long exposures yield Hubble-like definition, with galaxies visible over a ghostly landscape that recalls 19th-century albumen prints by Timothy O’Sullivan. Grey Wolf, a 2024 installation shown in a cyclorama brightly illuminated within the otherwise dim gallery, was by contrast shot in daylight, with pictures taken not of the sky, but from it. These curved photos—which echo Emmet Gowin’s “Nevada Test Site” series—look down on the Montana fields where nuclear missiles are siloed. The silhouette of the helicopter in which Lê must have ridden, visible in one picture, makes clear that her perspective here is less a bird’s than a bomber’s.

In “Stony the Road” at Sean Kelly, Dawoud Bey also reads what’s inscribed in the ground in 14 oversized exposures of dense foliage in a shadowy wood, and a slow-motion film moving through the same environment. The pictures, which evoke Atget’s and Adams’s documents of trees and roots, were made in 2023 along the Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, part of the Underground Railroad; the film is titled 350,000 for the number of people sold at Richmond’s slave markets from 1830 to 1860. Bey first turned toward landscape in “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” a 2017 series depicting real and imagined locations along the Railroad in Ohio. This newer photographic inquiry continues to point to meaning hidden in plain sight, underground.

A different kind of invisible connection is pictured by Larry Clark, whose portraits of New York City skaters, made just before his film Kids (1995), are on view at Ruttowski;68. Clark has a gift for portraying the delicate warp and weft of social fabrics, particularly in communities where they are simultaneously strongest and hardest to perceive. Here, teenaged skaters, in their baggy jeans and ratty T-shirts, give Clark permission to capture those contrary urges to blend in and stick out that rule a young person’s life.

In “TRANCE,” at Bortolami, Paul Mpagi Sepuya de- and reconstructs the optics of the social. Known for his intimate semi-self-portraits, with the artist often entangled with friends and lovers, here Sepuya attends to the studio. The mirror is a recurring motif here as elsewhere in his work; his reflective repertoire now expands to include the gazing ball, tripod-mounted, as a kind of anti-camera, or cradled in the artist’s hands, like a globe or a skull. These studies make explicit the baroque preoccupations that give Sepuya’s work its depth and its sometimes mind-bending complexity—his early modern, and just plain modern, attention to the mechanics of representation in all senses of the word.

Photography’s limits, both physical and conceptual, animate Roe Ethridge’s “Shore Front Parkway,” at Andrew Kreps, which takes its title from a landscape of a man-made berm at Rockaway Beach, behind which soulless apartment blocks loom as a rainbow reaches down to dispel the doldrums. A few such chance encounters are interspersed among staged studio shots, but even those vacillate between the real and the ideal, the constructed and the found: if you look closely at an entrancing still-life of red rubber gloves resting on a grid of checkered tiles, you notice the surface is ungrouted and flecked with grime.

Like Ethridge, Shannon Ebner, in “The Seaweed Synthesizer,” at Kaufmann Repetto, looks to the sea, specifically the sound at (and of) Black Point, Connecticut. Ebner’s practice has long lingered on the boundary between text and image, poetry and picture; here she explores the relationship between the visual and the aural, with photographs of LPs resting on sand (one inscribed, in black paint, “noise is noise”), two concrete forms that resemble ears, an underwater hyrdrophone distorted by the undulating water, and a found measuring stick, comically long, presumably used to track tides. A picture of letters spelling out SEA, / WEED / SYN, / THE, / SIZE / EAR anchors the exhibition, which resonates with a work, Sound Image—aquatic whispers playing in the space. With her characteristic conceptual sharpness, Ebner collapses sound into photo, confounding the senses.

John Divola transgresses literal boundaries in “The Ghost in the Machine” at Yancey Richardson. Divola has long made pictures from inside abandoned buildings, whose crumbing walls delimit a space beyond social, and visual, norms. In Blue with Exceptions (2019–2024), made at the derelict George Airforce Base in California, prints of AI-generated birds hang on the wall, their gauzy hyperrealism jarring against the gritty surfaces of the abandoned buildings, often spray-painted or lit by Divola. Yet the AI angle feels vogueish in comparison to the taut rigor of the “Vandalism” series (1973–75), also on display. The juxtaposition probes the fundamental contradiction, even discomfort, that defines the medium: photographers don’t just make pictures—they take them.